The proposed research is concerned with defining the cognitive process involved in sentence production. One approach to this question relates these processes to the lexical structure (both syntactic and semantic) of nouns and verbs. The hierarchical and property relations of 180 nouns and the case relations of 110 verbs have been empirically obtained. How the lexical structure of these nouns and verbs influences the processes of sentence production can be studied when sets drawn from these samples are presented as stimuli for sentence generation. A second approach is to construct drawings of events that vary in systematic ways and compare the "syntax" of the picture to that of a sentence produced to describe the picture. How the events are conceptualized and how the participants and objects are assigned roles in the sentence may be analogous, or even isomorphic, to the construction of sentence descriptions.